


the minotaur's keeper

by inwhispersandscreams



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 07:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwhispersandscreams/pseuds/inwhispersandscreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The Gods are angry at them still,</i> the people whispered, their words flying on the wind, <i>for the Minotaur still yet craves human flesh to sate its hunger.</i> But they had not seen her brother, or seen past the grotesque mix of bull and man. <i>He is just a boy,</i> she wanted to tell them, <i>just a boy who has never seen sunlight or touched grass. He lives in the dark, and when strangers venture to him, they scream and scratch at him. He is just a boy.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the minotaur's keeper

The walls of the labyrinth are veined with gold.

The labyrinth itself has been carved out of the earth, a maze of paths hidden underground, far away from sight and sunlight, and as such, the walls of it carried the hidden riches of Crete within them. Veins of gold, ores of iron and bronze and more, each stroked lines of red and silver, gold and bronze, that broke the dark earth, providing the lone interruptions of colour amongst the dim light of the underground labyrinth. Ariadne had always been fascinated by the flickers of deep jewelled light, the sole brightness against the darkness and gloom that permeated the air there, and tried to imagine a life seeing only those colours, a life of silver and bronze and the red of human blood. But her mind saw the blue of the sky and the green of the grass instead, too full of the joys of living above the ground, with open sky, to imagine a life tinged with shadows rather than the light of the sun.

All ores and deposits of wealth and metal were there through the riches of Crete itself, all but the gold, and only the line of gold ran throughout the length of the labyrinth. It had been placed there by Daedalus himself, the lines of it running as wide as a man’s hand at some points, and as thin as a wisp in others, but it ran there along the wall, leading the follower deeper into the heart of the maze. The one secret of the great Cretan labyrinth, and the key to its solving; the one line of gold that etched a path from entrance to centre and then to the entrance again, from monster to home.

The secret had been passed onto her by her mother, and from her mother before her, ever since the labyrinth had been carved out of the earth.  _Remember this always Ariadne, follow the line of gold_.  _You will never be lost if you follow the line of gold._ The secret was entrusted to the eldest daughter of Crete, for they knew that they would never leave, not while their ancestors’ shame still settled on them, Pasiphaë made to take to a bull to bear the punishment for Minos’ own arrogance.  _The Gods are angry at them still,_  the people whispered, their words flying on the wind,  _for the Minotaur still yet craves human flesh to sate its hunger_. But they had not seen her brother, or seen past the grotesque mix of bull and man.  _He is just a boy_ , she wanted to tell them,  _just a boy who has never seen sunlight or touched grass. He lives in the dark, and when strangers venture to him, they scream and scratch at him. He is just a boy._  

She calls him her brother, but he’d never been as such; he is vastly older than her, alive even in the times of her grandmother, but his cursed nature kept his heart beating in his chest, living as long as the shame did, or so they said. She had seen her brother only a few times, always half hidden in the shadows, eyes wary but never crazed, always prone to flight as she made the slightest move towards him. He had never attacked her, but she had never attacked him either, and that, Ariadne thought, was the difference. Who would not attack when attacked, defend their own life, no matter how little they’d lived?  _He’s human, just as me_ , she thought, but the whispers of her monstrous brother continued to whirl around her. The common folk said they heard screams in the night, even when the Athenian tributes had not yet come, but when the tributes came, they saw their shades on the island shore, wailing for lives lost at the hands and horns of a beast born of a cursed union between woman and beast. 

She brings him goats daily, throats slit and blood drying on their stringy coat, and she brings him oats and wheat, but when she returns the next day, treading the path that is lined with gold, the goat is gone but the oats remain.  _He is more man than beast_ , she thinks,  _if he eats the meat_. His teeth must have the sharp canines of her own human brothers, and the flesh and hair must catch in them like they do her own. If he were a beast, like they claimed, then he would take the oats, be the bull that was his father, but he takes the meat. She wants to present this truth to her mother and father, to the common folk who speak of monsters and screaming shades who stalk the nights, but they will take this truth as evidence of monstrosity.  _No bull would eat the flesh!_ they would cry, and ask for his death again, misremembering that her brother possesses human hands and a human heart, not knowing that when she ventures into the deep centre of the labyrinth, there is a haunch of goat left to await her, the one gift the boy-monster knows how to give.

 _He is just a boy_.

But he is also a monster, once white horns now stained with the red of lives lost and broken bodies, and those human hands have wrung life and last breath from human lungs while that bull’s mouth has eaten human flesh. He is monster and boy, both and neither, but he is not the monster that they speak of in whispers tinged with fear. He offers gifts to those who venture into his dark home and his eyes have the nature of a cow’s, liquid brown that are filled with wariness and gentleness, rather than rage and terror. He is born of a cursed union, born cursed and broken by the Fates’ design, but he is not a monster,  _never_ a monster.

“Will you give me the secret to the labyrinth?”

Theseus peers through the bars, flickering shadows cast over his face by the light of the torch clutched desperately in her hand. Too many times she hears of the tributes’ desire to kill and slay, to rip her monstrous brother limb from limb and emerge with his body broken behind them, but Theseus has no desire to.  _I simply want to escape, to go home to my father_ , he told her when she first came close to him, clutching desperately at her wrist. Dirt marred her skin as his hand was pulled away, and Ariadne was taken by the desperation in his eyes, and she thinks she can understand; she thinks she can make him  _see_.  _He wants to escape too_ , she wanted to tell him in those moments, before the guards dragged him to the cage where he would await his doom with the other Athenian tributes.  _He wants to live a life that is not full of fear; I can see it in his eyes when I venture there. He is more afraid of us, than we are of him_.

“Will you save him, my brother? Lead him from the darkness as a man, but not as a monster. Do no harm to him, and I swear he will not hurt you!” How does she convince him of this, when her own people speak of the screams of the dying that echo underneath the earth, resounding within the walls of the labyrinth? How does she make him understand that her brother is man, as well as bull, though all others have forgotten such? They view him as monstrous, a bull made to eat human flesh, a living subversion of the rightful way of things, but  _his hands are human too_ , offering her gifts in the darkness _._  He may be a beast, but so too is man, and their eyes contain none of the guileless quality of the beast that resides inside her brother.

“I will, I swear it. I’ll save the minotaur, lead him free of the labyrinth.  _Tell me the secret Ariadne_.”

He will free her brother, and that is all that matters. “Follow the line of gold,” she whispers to him, and the night air seems unnaturally chill as she imparts this coveted secret of the labyrinth to the stranger before her.  _Gods forgive me, I know I work against your hands, but he is a human and my brother besides. Gods above, forgive me_. “Keep it on your left when you venture in, and on your right when you venture out. Stray from it but once from the start, and you’ll never find your way out; the only path to be trusted is the line of gold painted from the very start. All others are tricks that will lead you astray –  _but follow the line of gold and lead my brother home_.”

And then she is gone, torch extinguished but the scent of its smoke clinging to her skin.  _Tomorrow, he shall be free_ , she thinks, and, for the first time, the knot of dread that comes with the arrival of the Athenian tributes eases in her gut. Theseus will free her brother from the maze that has been his prison, and with the secret of the maze, he will reach her brother before the others. He will find him, and calm him, and lead him from the darkness into the sunlight, and the Cretan monster of infamy shall be no more. There will only be her brother, half man, half beast, but  _freed_ , finally in the sunlight. Perhaps she ought to fear, Ariadne thinks as her eyes catch on the stars, finding constellations of hunters and doomed lovers, for the Gods are not kind when crossed. But for her brother, for the man-beast with human hands and an animal’s guileless eyes, she will risk it.  _He deserves more than to live in the dark_. _He deserves the sunlight and the grass and the sky. Gods forgive me, he is just a boy_.

She dreams that night of swords and blood stained bull horns, of running frightened through the labyrinth where the walls are veined with red and silver, but no gold in sight. She dreams of a monster devouring Theseus with his dark, sincere eyes, and hears screams within her dreams. She dreams of the victims past, of Hippophorbas and Melanippe, and when she wakes, her body shakes with imagined fear. Morpheus has sent her these dreams to plague her, to punish her for her actions, Ariadne is sure, but it is too late now. The deed has been done, the secret given, and when the sun sets this day, she will be there to watch as the fourteen tributes are pushed into the labyrinth, screaming as they always do, the girls wailing with tear streaked faces, crying out to Athena and Zeus, while the boys quake and mutter their own prayers in broken voices. But the result shall be different this time, and Ariadne can feel it in her bones; this shall be the time where the fourteen deaths are not blamed on her brother, and this shall be the time that one survives, and the Cretan minotaur escapes.

This will be the time that Ariadne defies the Gods.

She takes her brother no food when she rises that morning, to leave him hungry and wanting the human flesh as her father desires, gut churning as she watches the passage of the sun through the sky. The common folk are quiet in the town, but there is no silence – within their cages, the tributes wail and scream and beg. “Make them stop!” her sister commands, and the soldiers do her bidding, and when they return, there is blood on their hands, but there is silence, broken only when the soldiers drag the tributes from their cage and towards their doom.  _It will not be so this time_ , Ariadne thinks desperately, and wishes she could clutch at the young girls and tell them so, ease the terror from their faces and tell them of the gifts of food that the minotaur has left her.  _He’s not a monster, he’s just a boy. Just afraid. Oh don’t be afraid, you have nothing to fear_. But she stands by her mother’s side, watching the procession with her family, her eyes on Theseus and willing him to lead her brother from the dark and into the open air where she will be waiting, clad in the cover of darkness, hidden by Nyx’s blessing if she be so inclined, ready to show her brother the human kindness that he has missed since being born with a bull’s head in place of a man’s.

She feigns retirement along with her family, but when the night is completely drawn, she rises from her silks and covers and pads silently from the palace to the labyrinth where she waits.  _I will show him the sky, and teach him the stars._ There is a heart of a man inside him, she knows it. He is a boy too, as well as a beast.

But she will never know – Theseus exits the maze with his thirteen tributes behind him, and with a blade that drips with blood, one hand clutching the severed head of her brother. Anguish fills her as Ariadne watches Phaedra fly into Theseus’ arms, and suddenly Ariadne knows what has occurred.  _You have betrayed me sister_. Only Ariadne knows the secret of the maze, only she bears responsibility for it and the creature held within it, and only Phaedra knew of her affection for their brother, the one that Phaedra had always called the monstrous beast. And now both their hands have helped to slay their brother with wary brown eyes and human hands, and the rage at the act consumes her. She discards the invisibility that the night has given her to fly at Theseus, and she feels, for the first time, the power and rage that they all thought her monstrous brother must possess, for she would rend Theseus limb from limb and gouge out his lying eyes, rip out his tongue that dripped fallacies with each breath. She cares not about the blade in his hand, the blade that should not be there, and once again she thinks of Phaedra.  _Did you give him the weapon that cut our brother’s head from his body, sister? Did you give him the instrument that killed our own blood?_

The legends will say that she went with him out of love, but she went with Theseus spitting and screaming, the necessary ransom needed to allow the release of him and his kind from the island that was meant to be their doom, and when they are far away from Crete and the ships of her father are smaller than specks of dust, he sets her down in Naxos and sails away, her sister on board his ship with the severed head of her brother as his trophy for his heroic deed. Her mouth is parched dry by the time the evening sun sets, and Ariadne waits on the beach for the welcome embrace of death. She is a kinslayer now, killer of an innocent thing that trusted her when it had experienced nought but hatred and violence and blind fear by all whom had ventured into the heart of the labyrinth; death, she thinks, is what she deserves. But it is not Death who comes, not Thanatos nor Nemesis, but Dionysus, shoulders draped with a fox skin and holding his staff covered with ivy, the wood of it leaking honey, and the scent that surrounds him is one of summer wine and ripe figs.

“Would you like to speak with your brother, mortal?”

Her parched lips part slightly as his hand extends down to her, and for a moment she hesitates. But the moment passes, and Ariadne slips her hand into his, and lets him lead her away from the shore to where his maenads and satyrs dance in reckless abandon.  _They are man and beast all at the same time,_  Ariadne thinks to herself as she watches in awe at them,  _and yet not feared._  And when she joins them in the dance, the taste of Dionysus’ wine still fresh on her tongue, Ariadne understands for the first time how the God before her means to let her speak with her brother.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally written for a writing competition that any undergraduate university student in my state (or perhaps country) could enter. The rules were that the piece had to be under 3000 words (from memory), but there was little else in terms of content or type that was decided for us. And I decided to spin the tale of Ariadne and the minotaur, but not through Theseus' eyes. We know that tale. What about a tale of a girl who'd do anything to free her brother?  
> Though it won no prizes - in fact, it didn't even make it to the shortlist - I'm still incredibly proud of it. I hope you enjoyed it too!


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